You are here

According to tradition, for each holy day of a festival, Jews living outside of Israel celebrate two. So what happens then with the two holy days at the end of Sukkot — Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah — which seem to be separate holidays rather than duplicates of the same event.

The start of the New Year, the month of Tishrei, is full of holy days, among them four foundational ones: Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot and Simchat Torah-Shemini Atzeret. They are as different from one another as possible. Yet, we may also think of all four as two pairs of two. The first two -- the day of memory and...

Shemini Atzeret-Simchat Torah You've spent seven days eating, drinking and perhaps sleeping in a walled, tent-like structure with a roof specifically designed to let in the rain and the sunlight. Over the course of the week, with the exception of Shabbat, you've gathered together a curious combination of palm branch, two willow twigs and three myrtle branches, and held it...

Shemini Atzeret, Deuteronomy 14:22-16:17 With all due respect to U.N. resolutions 242 and 338 regarding so-called "occupied territory," let me explain what these words really mean. When my granddaughter, Ariel Daizy, comes to our house for a Shabbat or Yom Tov, the house becomes -- in the most delicious and sweetest sense of the word -- occupied territory. You can't...